


Two Battles Fifty Years Apart

by battle_cat



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Crusades Era Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Genocide, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Pre-Canon, Siege of Jerusalem, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26455975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Yusuf al-Kaysani is no soldier, but he will fight to protect the people and places he loves. That is how he ends up on the walls of Jerusalem, facing an invading army.Nicolò di Genova is no priest, but he’s starting to suspect God’s will has very little to do with why he’s in the Holy Land.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 47
Kudos: 118





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Despite saying I was not going to write a Yusuf/Nicolò backstory fic, I have...started writing one. I got really attached to the idea of Yusuf starting out as a civilian and not a trained soldier, and I really wanted to write about the siege of Jerusalem from a civilian's-eye view.
> 
> Needless to say, this fic deals with some extremely violent historical events. As someone with a long-term interest in how ordinary people experience political violence (both as victims and as perpetrators), exploring this is kind of what got me interested in writing this to begin with. But it is some heavy stuff, no doubt. I will try to provide specific content notes/warnings for particular chapters, and update the tags as I go.
> 
> Also, FWIW, Nicolò is not an ex-priest in this one. Since that backstory is never actually mentioned in the text of the film, and it doesn't particularly work for some things I want to do with his character in this fic, I've ditched it.

They are lying tangled together in Yusuf’s bed, in his rented lodgings in al-Quds, sweat still cooling between their bodies, when his lover says, “This is the last time we can meet like this.”

Yusuf pulls back a little to study the other man’s face, his dark eyelashes and sharp cheekbones, trying to guess which particular hesitation has crept into his bed this time. Isa is twenty-three, ten years his junior, the son of a man Yusuf’s father has occasionally done business with. This is the sixth time they have met this way.

He runs his thumb along Isa’s bottom lip, reddened with hungry kisses. “Do you tire of me so quickly?” Better to flirt than to express regret. These things are always temporary.

“You know that I don’t.” Isa won’t quite meet his gaze. “The next time you come to al-Quds, I will be married.”

Ah. He should have guessed. He’s surprised it hasn’t happened before now. “I see,” he says. He lets his hand drift, tracing the line of Isa’s slim waist, the ridge of his hip. “Is it a good match?”

Isa shrugs. “She’s an honorable woman, from a good family. My parents are very happy.” He flops back against the sheets, staring at the ceiling.

“And you?”

“I don’t know anything about how to be a good husband and father.”

“You’ll learn.”

Yusuf knows he is pushing it, with Isa. He is skirting the careful frontiers he has laid out for himself. They have already met too many times. They have a system. Upon arriving in al-Quds, Yusuf will stop by Isa’s father’s shop. He will make small talk, share greetings from his own father and the latest news from Tunis, casually mention where he is staying this time, while Isa works quietly somewhere nearby. Later, he will wait outside his lodgings for Isa to sneak out of his family’s home by night and join him.

None of this is a good idea. It was already verging on a bad idea to begin with, falling into bed with anyone connected, even by several degrees of separation, to his life at home. And now, he has gone and shared too much of himself, become too fond. It is even possible he has started planning his long looping summer trading trips with the aim of staying in al-Quds a bit longer than the city’s status as a provincial town of middling commercial importance demands. This time, he has even been so bold as to send the rest of the trading party on ahead to Yafa to load the ship, stealing an extra few days in al-Quds on the pretext of finishing up some business. Which means he and Isa are alone in the house now, except for his page, who conveniently sleeps downstairs.

He is usually much more careful than this. But…he likes Isa. He is quick-witted and funny, unfazed by having a lover who is older, who is well-educated and well-traveled. He drinks up stories from far-off places he has never been. He is more than a match when it comes to playful contests of teasing and flirting. And he is incredibly skilled at being discreet, at learning the unwritten boundaries of their relationship and staying _just_ within them.

“You know,” Yusuf says before he can think the better of it. “I have a wife and a lover.”

“That’s sweet, talking as if I’m your only lover,” Isa shoots back with a laugh.

“Maybe you’re my favorite.”

God help him, he should stop now, before he gets himself in trouble.

Most of his lovers do not know that he is married. They know hardly anything about him, other than that he is a purveyor of silks and fine fabrics, briefly in their city on business, and that they have caught his attention for the night. Anything beyond that, they have sense enough not to ask about, and he has sense enough not to tell them.

Most of the time.

“Not all of us are lucky enough to have a wife like Soraya.” Isa gives him a small, sharp smile.

He is right, of course. Yusuf’s situation is peculiar and about as fortunate as he can imagine. He has still had to fit his desires around the expectations of family, duty and propriety. That he has been able to do so, as well as he can imagine being possible, is a stroke of extraordinary luck. It is pointless to hope his lovers could do the same.

“You are a kind and clever man,” he says, cupping the back of Isa’s head to draw him in for a kiss. “You will be a good husband.” His mouth moves to the hinge of Isa’s jaw, the exposed line of his throat, the hollow between his collarbones. “You don’t have to leave quite yet, do you?” he murmurs, pulling their bodies closer together. “We still have hours before they’ll miss you.”

Later, much later, he will look back on this night and think of it as the last night of peace.

As soon as he steps out into the street in the morning, he knows something is wrong. The normally bustling thoroughfare is hushed and tense, pedestrians huddled in anxious knots of conversation.

Once he manages to insert himself into a cluster of three men on the nearest corner, he learns the topic of discussion is the Frankish army.

“The Franks? They’re in Arqa.” They have been stubbornly besieging the small village north of Tarabulus for three months, so far without capturing it.

“Not anymore,” the man next to him says. “They abandoned the siege, gathered their whole army, and the word is they are marching here.”

“My cousin is a farrier in the Fatimid cavalry stables,” says the man to his other side. “Their scouts have been arriving daily with news of the army moving closer. They are near Bayrut already.”

“They control nothing of the coast between here and Arqa. They wouldn’t dare,” Yusuf says, although he is already not so sure.

The Franks have been there, in the background, for his entire life, gnawing at the edges of the house of Islam. In his own lifetime, they have claimed Sicily and al-Andalus, become bold enough to cross the sea and raid the harbor at Mahdia. But they have never been so brazen as to take aim directly at the Holy City. Yet.

“Watch the garrison,” the cousin of the farrier says. “If they start preparing in the next few days, you’ll know a siege is coming.”

“Fuck me,” grouses the third man, who hasn’t had much to say so far. “Give us a year off at least!”

The Fatimids and Seljuks have tussled over the city for the past quarter-century, the competing dynasties playing at snatching it from each other with varying levels of bloodshed. The Fatimids had only just retaken it at the end of last summer.

By afternoon it seems like the news of the encroaching army has reached every corner of the city. Against his better judgment, he stops by Isa’s family’s shop in the early evening.

Isa’s father Mahmud is deep in quiet conversation with two younger men. “My brothers-in-law,” Isa explains quietly when Yusuf finds him in the back of the shop. “Two more are coming for dinner.”

Isa’s mother Fatima bustles out from the storeroom, her arms laden with folded scarves. She gives him a warm smile. “Ah, Yusuf. It’s good to see you.”

“My father sends his regards.”

“And your wife and children, they are well?”

“Noor has learned to walk. She is every bit the terror you’d imagine.”

Fatima laughs. “They grow so fast. Can you believe my youngest is about to be married?” She gives Isa an affectionate pat on the cheek, then dumps the stack of scarves into his arms.

“So I’ve heard.”

“You’ll stay for dinner, of course?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees Isa’s gaze flick to him. But one does not simply refuse hospitality.

“It would be my pleasure, Umm Isa.”

“Good. You know how to talk about something other than war.”

She putters around the back of the shop for a few minutes. Isa waits until she heads back into the storeroom to take a step closer, under the guise of tidying up a shelf that absolutely does not need to be tidied.

“I thought you would have left already,” he says quietly.

That is what a smart and sensible person would have done, Yusuf thinks. “Not yet,” he says.

That night Isa’s family’s home above the shop is crowded with his sisters, the younger two of five, their husbands and six children between them. Yusuf sits with his back against the wall and lets the affectionate pandemonium flow around him.

One of the kids, a boy of five or six, has hung back in his mother’s lap to eavesdrop on the adults’ conversation. He already knows the word siege.

“ _Again_ siege?” he whines, squirming against his mother. “We just _had_ one.”

“Well, we’re just very special, aren’t we?” his mother remarks drily.

Among the adults, opinions are divided on how worried to be. The Franks have captured more territory than anyone is really comfortable with, but they have also just spent three months besieging a small town without conquering it.

No one speaks about Ma’arra, sacked last winter with incredible bloodshed, its population promised safety in exchange for surrender and then massacred. The more lurid rumors about what happened there must surely be exaggeration. Surely.

Eventually the house empties out and it’s just Mahmud, Isa and Yusuf in the main room. Fatima moves quietly around them, offering coffee and dates and bringing dishes to the kitchen. She doesn’t join their quiet conversation, but Yusuf has no doubt she’s listening.

“You said the army is near Bayrut,” Mahmud says. “You know these places, yes?”

Yusuf nods. “I do.” He has traded along this coast for fifteen years, since he was still learning from his father, sailed into its sparkling ports and ridden up and down the fertile curve of fields and orchards that hugs the sea.

“How will the army approach us, do you think?” Mahmud asks.

“By land, straight up the coast, it seems. Here.” Yusuf reaches for his satchel and retrieves the bit of charcoal and small sheaf of paper he carries with him, ostensibly a practical tool for doing quick sums and inventory despite the small sketches he has doodled all around the margins. He unfolds a clean bit of paper on the floor and traces a curving line down it—the long sweep of the coastal plane that runs unbroken from Sinai to Anatolia.

“This is the coast.” He makes a small hatch-mark in the north, just inland a bit. “Arqa is…about here, near Tarabulus.” He makes three marks halfway up the coast, roughly equal distances apart from one another. “Bayrut, Sur, Akka,” he labels them in turn, moving southward. He draws a fourth mark, a little further from the rest. “This is Yafa. I think they will try to take the port first. They need a way to the sea, for reinforcements and supplies.” He traces the charcoal inland a bit to what he thinks seems to be the right distance. “From Yafa, it is…maybe three or four days’ march to us, here.”

“How long will it take them to reach us?” Isa asks.

“I don’t know. A big army moves slowly. Maybe a month?”

Mahmud nods. “We have time, then, to prepare. Lay in provisions. Secure everything from the shop.”

“You should give some thought to how you will defend your home, if they breach the walls.” Al-Quds may be used to sieges, but Yusuf is not, and the stories from Ma’arra will not leave his thoughts. “Do you have a weapon?”

He thinks of his sword, tucked away with his personal belongings now that he’s entered the city, the plain serviceable blade that his father had carried on the road before him. He is no soldier, but he would be a poor merchant indeed if he didn’t know enough to defend his trading party from thieves.

Mahmud raises an eyebrow. “I have been through a siege or two, son.”

“Of course,” Yusuf says.

“You should pack your things now, and get out while you can. Once the army gets closer, everyone who can leave will be scrambling for a ship.”

“You’re right.” Yusuf gets to his feet. “I should get back to my lodgings. I’ll be busy in the morning.”

Isa accompanies him to the front gate, lingering just a little too close for just a little too long. Yusuf doesn’t dare risk a kiss, but no one will look suspiciously on a fervent embrace between friends, his arms wrapped tight around Isa’s back and Isa’s cheek pressed against his neck.

“Be safe,” he says, in the way of people who know that is beyond their control.

“You too.” Isa pulls back, arranges his face into something self-assured. “My father has done this all before. We’ll be all right.”

“I will send blessings to your wedding from Tunis.” He lifts a hand, gets a small wistful smile in return, and then he turns into the darkened street and walks away.

He _should_ pack his things, and he _should_ get to the coast, where a ship is already loaded, waiting to carry him away to home and safety. For reasons he cannot quite understand, he lingers.

In the span of only a couple of days, the news gets rapidly worse. The Frankish army has passed Bayrut and is approaching Sur, an incoming tide rushing toward them, towns along the coast surrendering without a fight or offering provisions in exchange for being left alone.

The residents of al-Quds prepare for a siege with the resigned weariness of sailors on a stormy sea. It is not, so much, that no one is afraid. But fear is incidental. The storm does not care whether you are afraid of it or not. It is coming either way.

The soldiers of the garrison are busy every day now, making the land surrounding the city as inhospitable for the invaders as possible. Wells are sealed or poisoned; trees that could become siege engines are being hacked down; animals and any crops that can be hastily harvested are brought inside the walls.

The city’s defenses are formidable. A steep ravine provides natural protection to the east, and a heavily fortified citadel guards its western flank. The Fatimid soldiers have been hastily reinforcing the city’s double walls and deepening the ditch between them. Their numbers are modest, but their archers and swordsmen are skilled, and having only recently captured the city by siege themselves, they presumably have some understanding of how to defend it.

But it doesn’t take a military genius to see that all their preparations focus on defending the walls. If the walls are successfully breached…everyone inside them is fucked.

It is three days past the date when Yusuf was to have met his party at Yafa when a rider arrives at his door with a message from the ship’s captain, asking, politely, what in the actual hell he is doing.

What _is_ he doing? It seems objectively insane, not to flee to safety when he has the chance. But suddenly every quotidian detail of the city feels like a barb under his skin: the smile of the old woman he buys bread from every morning, the scent of oranges and cardamom and thyme in the neighborhood market, the laughter of the children who sound just like his children when they chase each other through the alleys. The twisting, hilly streets that reward the patient explorer with hidden courtyards and tiny shops you will never find again. The sand-colored walls that light up golden in the afternoon light, the white and grey and cream and pink of the city’s monuments and holy places. (It is all the same stone, Isa has told him, cut from the same quarries in the hills around them.) The way the church bells mingle with the _adhan_ on Sundays.

Al-Quds is not his home. But it is a city he has come to know a bit, and love, and now that it’s at risk, every grand and mundane beauty of the place digs its way into his soul and holds on. The idea of walking away and leaving all these people to face the invaders alone, just because he _can,_ makes him feel sick.

He stays up very late that night, long after the hour of _isha_ prayer. He wanders among the city’s winding streets and time-worn steps, among its uneasily-sleeping population, who never did anything but have the misfortune of being born in a place someone else wanted to claim. And he knows, in his bones, he’s not leaving.

He packs up everything of value that he can send home, keeping only a few personal belongings, some money and his sword and dagger. Only his page, Anir, who cares for the horses and pack animals, has stayed behind in al-Quds with him. He helps the boy load the donkey and then mount Yusuf’s own horse.

“Are you sure?” Anir asks. He is just a youth, barely sixteen, and scared.

“You think I’m risking the Franks getting their hands on a fine horse like this?” he says, although he knows Anir is not just talking about the horse. “You ride to Yafa, and you make sure they follow my instructions to depart immediately. I’ll find my way home when the time comes.”

He takes out the two letters he has written, one for his mother and one for Soraya, and makes sure Anir has them tucked away safely before sending the boy on his way.

He doesn’t know if his family will really understand. He’s not even sure _he_ would understand, if he were there and not here. More than once he has thought about the fact that if he hadn’t stayed for one more night with his illicit lover (his illicit _male_ lover) he wouldn’t have been here to hear the news and make this decision. Whether he thinks this is chance or God’s will…well, he is here, and if he has the ability to do something, anything, to help, he will try his best to do it.

That afternoon he goes back to Isa’s family’s house. He tries his best not to catch Isa’s gaze as he humbly offers his help to Mahmud to defend their family and property with what skill he has, in whatever way the older man deems best.

He is invited to stay for dinner, of course. Then, after the men talk late into the night, Fatima tells him in no uncertain terms that he is invited to stay the night there, and rolls out a pallet for him in the main room.

Finally, Mahmud retires to bed and it is just Yusuf and Isa, alone in the darkened room, both of them lounging on the floor, the barest distance of plausible deniability away from each other.

“Why are you doing this?” Isa asks quietly. The lamp is burning low, but Yusuf can still make out the uncertainty in his dark eyes.

“I couldn’t just…turn away.”

Isa’s hand is resting just out of reach, a finger idly tracing the patterns of the carpet. “You know…there can’t be anything more between us, right?”

“I know that. I’m not doing it for you.”

“How romantic,” Isa says, his usual playful smile making an appearance for a split second.

“I mean, I’m not doing it _just_ for you.”

“What about your family?”

“My family is safe. And when I return to them, God willing, I hope they will understand.”

In the following days, the city churns with restless energy. Foreigners and those with the means to go elsewhere are leaving daily; meanwhile refugees from the surrounding villages pour in, first in a trickle and then in a steady stream as the army approaches, overwhelming the city’s hospitality and sleeping in its streets and doorways.

Yusuf awakes one morning to a great commotion. He climbs onto a roof and watches the Fatimid soldiers empty the Christian quarter, expelling the residents from the city with whatever they can carry, children and valuables and family treasures carried on hips or piled into carts. Yusuf is sure they are thinking about Antioch, captured when a traitor opened a gate for the invaders. It still seems harsh. This is their city too.

Somehow, without any discussion being had, Yusuf has moved into Isa’s home, sleeping in the main room every night. Isa is the youngest and the only son, but his five sisters and brothers-in-law and their children flow in and out of the house constantly. Yusuf does not know what explanation has been given for why he is here, but if Isa’s other family members question it, they don’t do so to his face.

There is no privacy and little time for them to have so much as a conversation alone. An occasional lingering glance among the overlapping dinner conversation is all they have space for. Perhaps that’s for the best. It keeps them both careful.

He had not intended this at all, to find himself folded into Isa’s family in the sudden strange intimacy of crisis. He should be doing anything but this. But as the days tick by and the threat of war marches closer, he finds it increasingly impossible to pull away.

A few nights after Yusuf makes the decision to stay, Isa’s father disappears into a back room and comes back out with a sword. It looks ancient, and it needs to be sharpened, but it is well-made and finely balanced. He hands it to Isa.

“You have trained with a sword?” he says to Yusuf.

“Many years ago. But yes.”

“Teach him. If it comes time to use it, there won’t be anyone else coming to defend us.”

They practice in the courtyard, sparring with two halves of a broken broom handle at first, Yusuf struggling to drag up from memory the exercises he trained with half a lifetime ago. Yusuf has _carried_ a sword for years, but he has never had to actually _use_ it against another living person, beyond very occasionally brandishing it for intimidation. Up until now, he has considered himself lucky in that fact.

There is no way either of them will be a match for an experienced swordsman. They pointedly avoid talking about that fact. Maybe between the two of them and some desperation, they can keep somebody from dying.

Yusuf occupies his days with learning every street and alley and hidden passageway in the neighborhood around Isa’s home. Isa has lived here his whole life and knows the city intimately. Yusuf is not a stranger, but not nearly so familiar with it, and so he makes it his mission to memorize the maze of interlocking courtyards that lets a clever defender run through the city for blocks at a time without being seen on the main streets. Isa introduces him to the neighbors who always leave an interior door open, the houses one can skirt through surreptitiously when fighting or fleeing.

At night, after dinner, the men of whatever portion of the family is present that night sit on the floor and make plans and debate. No one needs to say what everyone already knows about the Frankish army—that they kill women and children, that they cannot be trusted to spare those who surrender without a fight, that no one will consider a family of small shopkeepers of any value to ransom.

Between all of the siblings, there are sixteen children to protect. Isa’s youngest sister is visibly pregnant. Yusuf tries not to think about the weight of it.

And so they plan. They argue about whether it is better to have the family together or spread apart in different houses, if it’s better to hide well or try to flee if the city is overrun, if leaving some of the cheaper fabrics in the shop downstairs will sate any looters or only encourage them to try looking for more in the house.

Yusuf brings out paper and charcoal, mapping out the twisting streets around them and marking down where everyone’s house lies. How many streets between them? What is the easiest route from this house to that? What is the alternate route if that way is blocked? What direction can we flee if they come from the north, the west, the south?

“They will come from the north,” Mahmud says with certainty. “That is where the city is vulnerable.” The terrain on the north side of the city is wide open enough to encamp an army and flat enough to maneuver a siege tower. The north wall is also the closest to their home.

“Your betrothed,” he says to Isa. “Where is her family’s home?”

Isa squints at the map, still used to picturing his hometown in landmarks and neighbors to greet, not lines and squiggles. “Here,” he says, then looks at the map again. “No, wait. Here.” It is very close to the wall.

“Do you think her family will agree to come shelter here with you, when there is a battle? They would be safer here.”

Isa looks uncertain.

“I will ask them,” Mahmud says.

On a hot, clear Friday, he prays alongside the men of Isa’s family at the al-Aqsa Mosque. The building is packed, the faithful pressed shoulder to shoulder, every _rakat_ shivering with a city’s collective fear held at bay. The air feels like a spark would ignite it.

As they are leaving the mosque, a shout goes up from somewhere in the crowd in front of them. People press in; a man is pointing to something in the distance, to the northwest. Yusuf slips through the crowd until he can get a clear view. And there, on the horizon, is the unmistakable dust cloud of an army on the march.

A day later, the gates of the city are drawn closed and barred. The siege is here.


	2. Chapter 2

Nicolò di Genova had not expected to spend his first weeks as a holy warrior doing construction.

To be fair, he had not had very many expectations at all. It hadn’t been his choice to go tromping off to the Holy Land. He is the fourth son of a minor noble (the disposable one, no one has exactly said but everyone knows it to be true), unmarried and not successfully fobbed off into an appropriate social role, and skilled enough with a blade. He had been told in no uncertain terms that at least _one_ of his father’s sons would be shouldering the glorious mantle of defending Christendom, and onto a ship bound for Jaffa he’d gone.

The excursion, so far, has been decidedly lacking in glory. By the time he arrives outside the walls of Jerusalem with the Genoese reinforcements, the siege has been ongoing for two weeks, and going poorly. Someone, somewhere has decided that the city is to be taken by assault as quickly as possible. But the walls are high and well-defended, and no one has thought to secure timber for siege engines in advance. The natives, for their part, have cut down any trees that could have been used for this purpose (or, for that matter, for firewood or a bit of _fucking shade_ ), and they have made sure to seal over or despoil every spring and well from here to the sea.

A day after he arrives, a supply of wood is somehow procured, and he’s pressed into working on the massive siege engines. It’s miserable work. The midsummer sun is relentless, and although they don’t work in the worst of the daytime heat, he collapses back into his tent each night drenched in sweat and with a splitting headache. His hands, unaccustomed to day after day of rough labor, blister and bleed and callus over and bleed again.

The army’s encampment along the north side of the city is massive, filled with gaunt wild-eyed men who have been at this for two long years, raving priests and assorted fanatical hangers-on. Water, food, horses and provisions are all in desperately short supply. He learns quickly to keep anything he doesn’t want stolen on his person at all times. The sole advantage of being part of the construction crew is that he is permitted to shove his way to the front of the queue for water when someone manages to acquire it. He learns quickly that he has to shove. There is never enough.

Through it all, the Saracen army taunts them from the walls, taking pot-shots at anyone fool enough to get within range of their archers. Their cavalry harass the foraging and water-gathering parties for sport. At least once, they send a saboteur into the camp under cover of night to try to light the half-completed siege towers on fire. There is a great commotion when he is caught, and Nicolò doesn’t stick around to see what happens to him, but there is a lot of screaming and in the morning there is blood on the ground and a head on a pike. Staring at the man’s dead eyes and lolling tongue, Nicolò feels a wave of disgust and something disturbingly like sympathy. 

Later that morning, the Saracens acquire a new hobby of catapulting things toward the construction area—rocks, shit, garbage, flaming balls of pitch-soaked cloth, anything else they can come up with. By the time a rock the size of his fist goes whizzing past his ear, any traitorous compassion he might have felt has thoroughly evaporated.

Nicolò hates it here. He hates this stupid city with its smugly unassailable walls. He hates the sun and the heat and the stench of camp. He hates constantly having to be on guard against arrows and rocks and raids and motherfuckers in his own camp willing to rob him blind given half a chance. He hates his father for sending him here, and he hates himself for reaching the age of thirty without being able to prove his value to his family in any other way. He is hot, and tired, and sore; on edge, hungry and parched, and none of those things are problems he can solve. So he focuses his anger on the one target that is acceptable: the enemy. As soon as he gets his chance, he will be more than happy to run his sword through as many Saracen soldiers as he can reach.

It has been nearly a month, and Yusuf is beginning to wonder if his being here is doing any good at all. Did he only do it to soothe his own conscience? Has he accomplished nothing more than giving the city another mouth to feed?

After much debate, it was decided that Yusuf’s eldest sister Najla, her husband Daoud and their four children would move into to Yusuf’s parents' home for the duration. Their house is closest to the wall and most vulnerable. (Despite Mahmud’s best efforts, the family of Isa’s bride-to-be has decided to stay where they are. They own a small shop, and want to protect it if they can.)

With the house as crowded as it is, Yusuf has taken to sleeping on the roof. He rather likes it. It’s cool at night, and reminds him a bit of being at sea, lying on his back on the deck and staring up at the vastness of the stars overhead. You can almost forget there is a siege on.

During the day, he tries his best to be useful. He scours the city for shops that still have flour for bread when Fatima runs out, paying the exorbitant prices with his own money and lying about how much it cost. He entertains Isa’s bored and restless nephews and nieces with as many stories as he can remember and some he makes up. The older boy and girl are both fascinated by his charcoal scratchings and the pens and ink he saves for important documents, and have the patience to sit next to him while he shows them how to write their names and then turns them into swooping calligraphy. He and Isa keep up their very amateur sparring practice, and sometimes several of Isa’s brothers-in-law join them. Isa is hesitant with a sword but quite a good shot with a slingshot, so he starts teaching Yusuf that. 

But mostly, they wait, days stretching out with the monotonous grinding anxiety of being trapped somewhere, trying not to think about how the city is filled with too many people and not enough food and no one knows how long this will last.

When the blanket of mingled boredom and tension in the house becomes too much to bear, they wander close to the wall and try to guess at the progress of the siege. A few times now they have heard the noise of battle and seen the soldiers running about, but the roof of Isa’s house is not high enough to see clearly what’s going on.

“It would be better if we could get up there,” Yusuf says, staring up at the high wall. “Then at least we would know if we were winning or losing.”

“The commanders wouldn’t trust you. Who’s to say you haven’t been a Khurasanid spy this whole time?” says Isa with a sly smile.

There’s no love lost between the Fatimids and the Khurasanids of Tunis at the moment, it’s true. He’s sure there _is_ a Khurasanid spy or two skulking around the city, eager to report on any Fatimid military misfortunes. And yes, perhaps if he’d lived a different life, one a bit more like an adventure story, he could have played that role himself. But he doesn’t live in an adventure story. He is just an ordinary man who doesn’t want the people around him to die.

“We just need _one_ commander to trust us,” he says.

Perhaps only because he needs to feel like he is doing something, he makes this his new project. The soldiers of the garrison must go somewhere to relax when they are not on duty, and there must be at least one reasonable officer he can make a connection with.

He skulks around the blocks near the citadel at night, finds the places where the soldiers go to smoke shisha and play backgammon and drink tea, or wine, for those who do not consider it forbidden. He picks the café where the officers seem to congregate most frequently and installs himself there on a nightly basis, drinking glass after glass of tea with mint, and watching. (If nothing else, it’s useful for filling up his stomach after dinner. The adults at Isa’s house are eating half what would satisfy to make sure the children get enough.)

Several nights in a row, there is a man who catches his gaze. He is Yusuf’s age or older, and by the way his comrades defer to him, in speech and body language, he seems to be of high rank.

This is a dance he knows very well by now, this game of looks, a certain _kind_ of looks, exchanged with men in public spaces. The wordless way of saying _come closer_ and _me too_ and _yes, I am what you’re looking for._ And, well…Yusuf does not consider himself a vain man, but he is aware of the way people look at him, women and men alike. He has always been able to get a certain kind of attention if he wanted it. And he is confident that he has this man’s attention.

He knows it’s not a guarantee of anything, knowing that they share this. But maybe it’s…a bridge. _I am someone who can be trusted to keep a secret._

On the third night of being in the café with this man, he makes sure he has a backgammon board at his table, an invitation. The next time the man looks over, Yusuf winks.

A few minutes later, the man is at his table. “May I join you in a game?” he asks, and Yusuf gestures for him to sit across the table from him. The game is there for them to have a reason to talk to each other, and they both know this.

“Ziad,” the man introduces himself. Up close, it is clear he is some years older than Yusuf, gray flecking his close-cropped beard, his hands callused from a lifetime of wielding a sword.

“Yusuf,” he replies, echoing him in only sharing a first name.

After a few rolls of the dice and exchanges of small talk and _looking,_ Ziad says: “You are not from around here.”

Yusuf’s Qudsi dialect is more than passable at this point—he has always been a quick study with languages and accents—but not flawless. “I was born in al-Iskandariyya,” he lies easily. “But I have traveled widely.” He hopes that is neutral enough not to raise any hackles.

“And how do you find yourself in al-Quds in this unfortunate hour?”

“I have an interest in the city’s protection.”

“Do you?” Ziad is assessing, he can tell, deciding whether this is some kind of trap, a way to tricking him into revealing information.

“There are people here I care about,” Yusuf says, simple and honest. “That is all.” He picks up the dice cup.

He says nothing more about it and for a while they are just two men playing a game and engaging in some very reserved and careful flirting, of the type that happens with someone who has a certain reputation to maintain. In another time, they might have slipped away together, back to wherever Yusuf was staying, the kind of liaison that would have only lasted a night, between two people experienced enough in this that the rules never needed to be discussed.

Something else happens instead. Yusuf goes to the café, not every night but several times a week, and often Ziad is there, and they repeat their ritual of playing a few games of backgammon and chatting. After about a week, Ziad says at the end of the night: “Come with me.”

They pass quietly through the darkened city streets to reach a tower on the north side of the wall. The guards give Yusuf a few suspicious glances but Ziad holds up a hand and they let him pass. They ascend the narrow staircase and emerge on the top of the wall.

For the first time, he sees the full might of the invading army spread out below them, the flickering fires of the camp stretching far across the plain. In the distance, barely sketched out between moonlight and the fires of the camp, sit the hulking forms of two enormous siege towers.

“This is half,” Ziad says. “There is another camp on the other side of the city.” He speaks quietly, standing close to Yusuf on the battlement, his voice barely audible over the night breeze. “They finished the siege towers today. I think they will try to move them to the wall soon.”

Yusuf sneaks a glance at the other man. His jaw is set with the grim fatalism of someone who has fought in many battles and does not like his odds in this one at all.

“We’ve been told a relief army marches from the capitol,” he says. “They will not arrive in time.”

“I am no soldier,” Yusuf finds himself saying. “But I have carried a sword for protection while traveling with my caravan. I would be ready to defend the city by whatever means I could. I know other men who would do the same.”

Ziad gives him an appraising look, and he half expects to be dismissed, or laughed at, or told off for suggesting that the troops currently patrolling the walls are inadequate. But Ziad says: “These other men you speak of. Bring them to the citadel at first light and I will find a place for them.”

And this, more than anything, makes fear settle low and cold in his gut, that this experienced soldier is asking for help from shopkeepers and tradesmen. But he has made an offer and he’s not going to retract it now.

As it turns out, he comes back with just one man. Mahmud, Daoud and Isa had been awake still, when he had returned to the house, and they had sat up on the roof discussing it for some time. In the end it was decided that Mahmud and Daoud would stay at the house, and Yusuf and Isa would go to the wall.

“Isa,” Yusuf says, introducing him to Ziad. “A friend.” Ziad’s gaze flicks between them for a split second but he says nothing.

They walk toward the north side of the wall as the first light of dawn creeps over the hills to the east, and Yusuf sees that they are not the only civilians in between the ranks of helmeted and armored soldiers. There are small clusters of men, and boys, some painfully young, crouching against the battlements. Most look less prepared than Yusuf, with his sword and dagger and some scant knowledge of how to use them. Some have whatever improvised weapon they could scrounge up from home. Some have a pile of rocks and a slingshot. Some have nothing.

“It is a poor commander who would let a city fall out of pride,” Ziad says quietly. “An invader struck down by a kid with a rock is just as dead as one killed by a master swordsman.”

They have reached a section of the north wall, archers clustered in uneasy readiness behind the fortifications. “This is your position,” Ziad says simply. There is a man surveying the line of troops, and Ziad claps him on the shoulder. “Do as he says.” And that’s it. He’s gone, striding off to check on another section of the wall.

They sit crouched below the fortifications, straining to hear any warning sound below. There is nothing to do but wait, trying to breathe through the viscous waves of terror that keep rolling over him. In the grey dawn light, Isa’s face looks horribly, unbearably young, and scared. Yusuf wishes, with an intensity that feels like physical pain, that he could hold him, and kiss him, and promise him that his home will be safe and he will live through this and get married and raise children who will never know anything of war.

The best he can do is find Isa’s hand in the shadows between them, twine their fingers together and hold on tight.

The one, solitary, single good thing about a battle, Yusuf learns, is that during the fighting there is very little time to be afraid. Once the first catapult stones hit the walls, everything narrows down into vivid focus on the next task.

Ziad is right. In a battle of throwing things at each other, there is plenty a civilian can do just as well as a soldier, and Yusuf does it. By midday his fingers are singed from lighting arrows to hand up to the archers and his shoulders ache from loading chunks of stone to be flung down toward the invaders.

He loses track of time. He breathes in rock dust and smoke and only realizes his mouth is the texture of parchment when someone hands him a waterskin. A man whose name he never learns pulls him down just in time to avoid a crossbow bolt that goes streaking over their heads, close enough he can feel the wind of it passing, and it’s only hours later that he plays that moment back in his head and thinks _you almost died there._ The only thing he is able to keep track of is that Isa is somewhere nearby, to his right side, still alive.

The battle grinds on into the night, and eventually someone in charge tells him and Isa to go back to the citadel and get a few hours’ sleep while they can. They stumble into a crowded room filled wall to wall with restless soldiers, and it’s only when he slumps down with his back against the wall that he realizes how exhausted he is. Isa slides down the wall next to him, their shoulders resting against each other.

A platter of bread and _ful_ is being passed around, and a young soldier hands it over to Yusuf without hesitation. When he thanks the soldier and dredges up the few pleasantries he can remember in Masri dialect, the young man beams. He is barely more than a boy, younger than Isa, another stranger defending a city far from home.

Yusuf makes himself eat some bread even though his stomach still feels clenched and sour with adrenaline. He nudges Isa, already half asleep with his head on Yusuf’s shoulder, and makes him eat something too.

“Do you think we’re winning or losing?” Isa asks while picking at the bread.

Yusuf shakes his head. “I can’t tell.” All he knows is that a day has passed and they are still alive.

He is not sure exactly how he knows, but by the afternoon of the second day, he begins to understand that they are losing.

In the brief glimpses of what he can see over the wall between volleys, he can tell the Franks have broken through the lower, outer walls and have filled in the ditch within them enough to start inching the siege towers closer. The mood among the soldiers around him tilts into a sharp edge of desperation; the commands become louder and more strident; the volleys of arrows faster.

He cannot let himself think about it. He keeps doing what he’s told, and stops trying to look over the wall.

The sun sets, and, somehow, he and Isa have survived the day, again.

When they are sent back to the citadel that night, Ziad is there conferring with some officers. When the brief, tense meeting is done, he calls them over.

“You are still alive,” he says with a hollow smile.

“By God’s will, yes.”

“Come with me.”

He leads them to a room that maybe is part of the armory; Yusuf’s exhausted brain has yet to fully understand the layout of this building. What he processes are piles of armor and neat rows of helmets on the floor. The blood is still drying on some of them.

“Find something that fits, both of you,” Ziad says. “It won’t be perfect, but if you’re going to be on the wall tomorrow, you should have something.”

That’s how he winds up with a helmet and a heavy leather gambeson that fits him mostly well enough, and has only a little dried blood on it. It’s better than nothing, he figures.

That night, he and Isa find room enough to lie flat on the floor, on thin pallets that someone slept on before them and someone else will after. Everyone is sleeping shoulder to shoulder; no one will notice or care if they are curled a little more tightly together than some of the others.

They lie facing each other, foreheads pressed together, sharing the same air in trembling breaths. The protective buzz of adrenaline has worn thin by now, and fear is creeping through again. He curls his hand around the back of Isa’s neck, keeping them close together.

“What do we do if the wall is breached?” he whispers.

“I remember the plan.”

“Tell it to me again.”

“Get off the wall as fast as we can. Run back to my house. Get to my family.”

“And if you can’t find me?”

“Run anyway.”

He swallows back the lump in his throat. “And if I can’t find you?”

“You’ll do the same.”

Isa shifts, tucking his face into the hollow of Yusuf’s shoulder. He curls around him until they are pressed so close together he can feel both of their hearts pounding.

“I don’t want to die tomorrow,” Isa whispers against his skin.

“We won’t. Not if I can help it.”

When the walls of the city of al-Quds are breached, it happens so fast that Yusuf barely has time to understand what is going on. One minute there is a frantic volley of arrows, and the next minute there are swords flashing in the mid-morning sun, and yelling, and a horde of invaders pouring onto the wall, which suddenly seems terrifyingly close and narrow.

He has a split second to yell over his shoulder to Isa: “Stay close to me!” And then he draws his sword, as if he has a fucking clue what he’s doing with it.

All he registers is the flash of color from a foreign tabard, and then there is a broadsword slicing toward him; he blocks it before he has time to think. He can’t even register a face; all he can focus on is the sword, blocking and blocking and trying not to die.

Someone behind him cuts his opponent down with a slice behind his knees; in the time it takes the man to fall the soldier whips his sword into position to cut his throat with a single clean stroke.

Yusuf turns, looking for the closest way to retreat, but there are invaders rushing in from that side too, hacking through the defenders like dry brush. He catches a glimpse of Isa out of the corner of his eye, fighting a man a head taller than him; sees that man take a blow from someone behind him and fall—for a split second he catches Isa’s terrified wild-eyed gaze and knows they need to get _out_ of here—

He turns around again in time to meet the cold, pale eyes of the man who drives the sword deep into his chest between his ribs.

He has a second to register shock. He’s not even sure he feels pain, not yet, just an awful pressure on his chest and the blank buzzing horror of being impaled on something. He can’t breathe; he can’t speak; he is dimly aware that he’s sliding to his knees as the world starts to grey out at the edges—

The man _shakes_ him, tugging at the sword still lodged in his body, his blood-spattered face twisting into a snarl. Finally he plants his boot on Yusuf’s chest and wrenches; jerking the sword free and oh _there_ is the pain, God help him—

He drops to the ground, dimly aware of his own blood running hot over his hands where they shake at his torso, and the man steps over him without a backward glance, already moving on to kill someone else—

He lies on the hot stone of the wall, staring up at the lapis-lazuli sky and struggling to draw one last breath, and all he can think is that he’s _sorry,_ that he couldn’t keep his promise to protect Isa’s family, that he never got one last chance to kiss his mother and hold his children and hear Soraya laugh again—

Nicolò never sees the man who kills him.

After two days of inching toward the wall through a hail of arrows and missiles, he is more than ready to go running up the siege tower ladder when the moment finally comes. When he bursts out on the wall he is not afraid; he is nothing more than savagely, viciously happy.

He slices through Saracen defenders like butter, their armor no match for his heavy sword at close range. He parries and whirls and thrusts, cutting a swath of destruction, feeling still-warm blood splatter onto his face, and it’s brutally satisfying. It feels fucking _great._

He drives his sword deep into a man’s chest and watches it come gore-streaked out the other side; the man falls to his knees and it’s only when that pulls him forward that he realizes his blade is lodged in the other man’s ribs. He pauses to yank himself free and he doesn’t _mean_ to look at the man’s face but he does, straight into his luminous dark eyes that are so full of pain and sorrow it’s like a knife in the gut—

He puts a boot on the man’s chest for leverage and hauls his sword free, propels himself over the falling body and swings for the next defender in reach. He will not think about the eyes of the man he just killed, he won’t—

He is raising his sword to deliver a killing blow when someone comes from behind, someone he doesn’t catch in his peripheral vision. He feels the blade drive deep into the vulnerable spot beneath his raised arm, feels the force of it slam him against the wall and he knows it’s a fatal wound instantly, _fuck_ —he puts the hand he can still lift against his side and feels blood staining his chest—he’s on the ground and he doesn’t remember falling and all he can think is _fuck, fuck,_ he didn’t want to die on this stupid wall in this stupid city so far away from everything he knows—

The final image that flashes before his eyes, in vivid detail in the moment before everything goes dark, is the face of the last man he killed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the violence gets intense, folks, and we are going right into it. CW for original character deaths, Yusuf himself dying fairly horrifically several times, and descriptions of widespread genocidal violence and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including the burning of a synagogue.
> 
> I have updated the tags but please let me know in the comments if you feel there is anything additional that should be tagged for.

_A vast plain and the pounding of galloping horses’ feet—the flash of steel and the whoop of a woman’s voice, joyful in battle—_

_A pale-eyed man—the man who killed him—raising his sword high, teeth bared, ready to strike—_

Yusuf has a crushing weight on his chest. He struggles to draw a breath and it’s like inhaling shards of glass. His mouth tastes like blood. He is lying with his cheek pressed against stone, his body covered almost entirely by something heavy. One of his arms is trapped underneath his body and has gone so numb he only knows it’s there because he can see his own hand out of the corner of his vision.

He makes himself take another breath, and this time he coughs, expelling a mouthful of blood onto the stone by his face. The stone… He is on the wall. He is on the wall around al-Quds, and there was a battle.

He realizes, with a sudden sick lurch, that the weight on top of him is a human body. A dead human body.

He flails and shoves, clawing with the hand he can still use at cloth and leather—it’s _wet_ —on the weight above him, finally managing to shove it off and sit up, gasping.

He’s on the wall, in the blazing midday sun, surrounded by the bodies of dead soldiers. He is covered in blood; his head feels ready to split open; and his legs are still trapped under the staring corpse of a Fatimid archer.

He died. _He died._ He _remembers_ it. He remembers the twisted face of the invader who killed him, and he remembers with horrifying, visceral certainty, the feeling of steel going into his body and coming out the other side.

He looks down at his chest and there is a gash in the leather gambeson, all right. The lower half of his torso is soaked in blood, although he can’t be sure it didn’t come from the corpse that was lying on top of him. He shoves his fingers into the slit in the leather and feels the cloth tacky-stiff with blood underneath…and beneath that nothing but smooth unbroken skin.

 _What...?_ His thoughts slip and scrabble and grasp for any logical explanation and come up empty. He’s breathing hard, and his chest aches, although the broken-glass feeling from moments ago is gone. Sensation is coming back into his left arm and it _hurts,_ but at least he can move his fingers. His head is throbbing in sick pulses; he scrabbles off the second-hand helmet he’d been wearing and drags a hand through his sweat-damp hair.

He slowly becomes aware of the fact that the wall is littered with the bodies of soldiers, all of them dead. Every one, except for him.

There’s a sound filtering up from the city below. As soon as he recognizes it, he realizes he’s been hearing it since he first regained consciousness. It’s screaming.

_Isa. Where is Isa?_

The thought pierces the rising blank fog of terror. He looks around him, behind him, where he remembers seeing Isa last, but there is no body he recognizes. He drags his legs out from under the archer’s corpse and hauls himself to his feet.

Below him, in the city, he can hear crashing and yelling, see smoke from fires already burning.

_Get off the wall. Run back to my house. Get to my family._

He has to try. His sword is lying nearby. He grabs it and stumbles toward the nearest staircase, picking his way around and over the bodies of slain defenders, a shaking hand braced on the battlements to steady him.

He finds Isa’s body just a handful of steps from the stairs. He had almost made it down. He drops to his knees, sliding a little in the pool of blood from the wound in Isa’s chest, a hand clamped over his mouth to stifle whatever wild sound wants to come out. And then he can’t stop it; he’s keeling forward and burying his sobs in the curve of Isa’s neck and shoulder, against flesh that feels stiff and _wrong,_ putting his arms around a body that is still and unbreathing and not like holding a living person at all.

Even through his heaving, gasping sobs, he can hear people screaming down below. He has to go. He promised. _He promised._ He makes himself sit up, wiping his face of tears and snot and blood even as he’s still crying, forcing himself to take long, shaky breaths until he can at least wipe his eyes enough to see.

He closes Isa’s eyes with a shaking hand. He can't do anything else for him, but he still has time, maybe, to keep the promise he made. He retrieves his sword, again, from where he’d dropped it, and he staggers down the steps into the city.

In the streets leading away from the base of the wall, every house has been broken open. There are bodies everywhere. At this first, fatal point of impact, the invaders had killed anyone they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, children—struck down as they tried to hide or flee or defend themselves with whatever they had. There are bodies crumpled in the street, spilling out of open doorways, leaning grotesquely against gore-streaked walls.

He sways, frozen for a moment under a numb, buzzing wave of horror. Then there is a crash from what sounds like only a street or two over, and he runs.

He remembers the way. They had practiced it— _he and Isa had practiced it together_ —enough times that he can do it even when sick and reeling with shock. He only has to double back and change course once, stumbling back gagging from a narrow alley so choked with bodies that he can’t get through. He runs, following the wave of carnage radiating out from the wall, hoping against hope that it hasn’t yet reached Isa’s home—

The heavy shop door is wide open. He tries to breathe through choking terror as he approaches.

The shop is ransacked, by people who looked more interested in destroying than looting. He picks his way through the wreckage, toward the entrance to the courtyard at the back. His hands are shaking so badly he needs both of them on the sword.

Mahmud and Daoud’s bodies are in the courtyard. By the looks of it they’d tried to defend the stairs up to the house with a garden hoe and the small axe they used to cut firewood.

There’s a dead Frank in the entranceway of the house, blood from a gash in his throat pooled around his head. Yusuf follows the trail of blood back to the main room, where Fatima’s body lies on the floor. On the carpet near her hand is a kitchen knife, bloody up to the hilt.

 _Good for her,_ he thinks with a savage flare of rage.

He searches every room in the silent house, calling out softly for Najla; checks all the possible hiding places they had picked out in advance, including the ones that were only small enough to hide a child. Isa’s sister and her children are nowhere to be found.

Eventually he goes back down to the courtyard and just stands there, trying not to look at the bodies, swaying slightly under wave after wave of horror and grief, and sick, gut-churning shame at having failed so spectacularly at the one thing he had prepared himself to do.

 _I couldn’t protect any of them,_ he thinks.

The back gate that leads into the courtyard adjacent to theirs is open. Maybe Najla and the kids got away. He wants to believe that’s what happened.

He’s not sure how long he stands there—time has gone a bit slippery—but he’s startled out of his shock by a scream that sounds like it’s right behind him. Before he has time to think about what he’s doing, he’s running toward the sound.

He bursts into the adjacent courtyard in time to see an invader corner a woman he recognizes as one of Isa’s neighbors and run his sword into her breast. In the span of a breath, the waves of helpless grief that are threatening to drag him under condense into white-hot fury.

He runs at the Frank while he’s busy yanking his sword out of the woman’s chest; the man turns, too late, and before he has a second to get his guard up Yusuf has his blade at the man’s throat and he’s driving it in, up into the soft vulnerable flesh under his chin.

The man staggers back, scrabbling at his throat in shock as blood pumps between his fingers. As he drops to his knees, more than anything, he looks _surprised,_ that such a fate could befall him, that one of the people he has been busy killing might be capable of killing him back.

Yusuf has never killed anyone before. It’s not like he expected. He had, before this moment, thought of himself as someone who would feel remorse or pity at taking a life, even if it was in self-defense. Instead all he can think is _You had that coming, you bastard._

He drops to his knees beside the woman, the neighbor whose name he can’t remember, one more person he wasn’t there in time to protect. She is gasping wetly through the wound in her chest, struggling for her last breaths. There is already so much blood on the ground. He reaches for her hand, trying to offer a scrap of comfort in her last moments, but she pushes him away, motioning for him to go, run, flee.

He can hear screams, yelling and crashing from somewhere nearby. He picks up his sword, and he runs toward the sound.

In the very next house over, he dies. He runs in through a back door to find a Frank struggling with a young man, frantically wrestling over the sword shoved under his jaw. Yusuf runs without thinking, launching himself at the invader and leaping onto his back, an arm around his throat. There’s a chaotic moment of thrashing and flailing and he sees the young man scramble away and out the door— _he saved someone!_ —and then the two other Franks he hadn’t seen are pulling him off their comrade, grabbing his arms, holding him still in a moment of blood-curdling terror before the man whose attack he foiled picks up his sword and slits him open, low across his belly.

It hurts like nothing he’s ever felt. He dies on the floor of a stranger’s house, clutching his own guts, moaning into the carpet in agony.

He wakes up, and he remembers every second of it. His body is perfectly whole and healed, again. But he still _remembers_ dying, and he sits on the floor and rocks for a while, clutching his knees and shaking so hard his teeth chatter.

 _You saved someone._ He grabs onto that thought like a rope thrown to a drowning man, holds on to the image of the young man running out the door and tries to shove away the sense-memory of his own entrails sliding through his fingers.

_You saved someone. You can do it again._

He has no idea why he cannot die, or what any of this means. But the simple, brutal logic that presents itself is this: _God has said you are not done with al-Quds._

_You stayed here to fight. So fight. So long as there are living people in the city, protect them._

He focuses on steadying his breathing, calming it down from the panicked whistling gasps it had been when he woke up. He wills his hands to stop shaking…well, not completely, but enough that he can pick up his sword. He makes himself get to his knees, and then get to his feet, and once again, he runs toward the front line.

Yusuf loses track of how many people he kills, and how many he hopes he might have saved, over that long afternoon and evening.

The Franks roam through the city in packs, killing and burning and looting, and he stalks them, skirting through back alleys and ruined houses to come out in front of them. He throws himself into skirmishes more times than he can count, putting his body between a sword and a civilian over and over and over again. He learns to ignore the invaders who are only looting and focus on the killers. He learns to push through his fear of stepping right inside their guard, learns to startle them and throw them off by ducking in and grabbing their sword hand in a way someone afraid of being run through wouldn’t dare. He learns that his odds are better putting his sword away and using his short dagger to dart in quick and surprise and stab; learns to use the body of the first man he kills as a shield against the sword of the next one; learns to get his blade quickly under an attacker’s chin and thrust in and up without hesitation. By sunset he can do it without missing a beat.

He tells people to run and they do. He tells people to run and they stay frozen to the spot no matter what he does, or fight him as if he is trying to kill them too. He steps in front of a woman and her children cowering in a doorway, tells them to run after he’s dispatched three Franks in front of them, circles back just minutes later to find them dead in a heap two doors down, all their throats slit. He stops looking at people’s faces after that.

After he kills a Frank about his height and build, he takes the time to drag the man inside a house and steal his heavy chainmail shirt and tabard, thinking the former will protect him and the latter will give him the element of surprise. But wearing the mail exhausts him after what cannot be more than an hour, and all the tabard does is frighten the people he is trying to protect. He strips both off, swearing when the mail catches in his hair, and relies on his increasingly shredded leather gambeson and incandescent fury.

He loses track of the wounds that should have ended him. He sinks down in an alley, blood coursing from a deep gash in his thigh so fast he slips in it before he can sit down. He watches the wound heal itself before his eyes, the ragged edges sealing themselves back together, the greying tunnel-vision of blood loss receding. He doesn’t know what he is, why God has chosen him of all people to defy death, and he doesn’t care.

He dies two more times, and both of them are horrible. The first one, at least, is quick—his throat slashed in a fight by a sword stroke he wasn’t fast enough in blocking. At least the ghastly feeling of choking on his own blood, his last breaths whistling out of holes in his body that should _definitely not be there,_ only lasts a few seconds.

The second time is…a lot worse. It’s four against one and he gets cornered and disarmed and they’re _pissed_ that he distracted them long enough for the woman they were harassing to run away. They take their time beating and kicking him, stabbing him half a dozen times with his own dagger and laughing about it, and probably would have moved on to finding far more grisly things to do to him if a lucky blow hadn’t knocked him sideways and smashed his temple against the corner of a stone step.

He lies in the street for what feels like a long time after that one, braced on his forearms to keep his face above the pool of his own blood. For a moment the shield of his focused rage slips and the nightmare of the city rushes in around him: the screams still echoing as the setting sun lights the streets up massacre-red, the overwhelming reek of blood, the acrid stench of beloved and beautiful things going up in flames.

He can’t think about it. If he thinks about the scale of it all he will go mad right here in the street. He drags himself to his feet, wipes the dark waterfall of blood off his face, and keeps fighting.

He is not the only defender still alive inside the city. He sees a few soldiers who must have survived the battle on the walls, and a few civilians fighting with whatever they could find. But there are so few of them. Far too few to stand against the tidal wave of violence washing over the city.

By nightfall, he is climbing over bodies in the street, sliding in blood as he skids down the stone steps of the city in search of the next invader to kill. There are fires burning all around the city; he gets close enough to one to recognize it as the synagogue he walked past sometimes. He stands as close as he can make himself get to the building for probably too long, trying to screw up the courage to run into the inferno, just in case there is anyone still trapped inside. He can’t do it. It is probably too late by that point anyway.

Some time after dark, he is suddenly hit by a wave of dizziness. He stumbles and goes down hard on his knees, pressing his forehead against the nearest wall until the world stops spinning. It occurs to him, distantly, that he can’t remember the last time he ate or drank anything. Maybe he still needs to do that.

He wanders through the ravaged market, eventually finds a bakery that has somehow been passed over in the looting. The big clay storage urns in the back of the shop are miraculously still full of water, and he gulps it down, scooping it up with what he’s pretty sure is a flour-measuring cup. He chews this morning’s bread and it tastes like sand in his mouth, but his stomach gurgles insistently enough that he makes himself eat more of it.

He’s shaking again. He can still hear screams coming from somewhere not too far away, the slaughter continuing unabated into the night. He should go back out; he should try to help more people. But he is so tired.

There’s a gap just big enough to fit a person between the water urns and the cold, dark bread oven, and he sinks down into it, folding in upon himself. He’ll make himself get up soon. He’ll make himself find the next person to save soon. He won’t think about how so many people, so, so, so many people, are already dead.

Some small scuffling noise nearby catches his attention. He’s immediately alert, hand on his dagger and eyes searching the dark outside the bakery window. He creeps quietly toward the door and looks out.

There, in the dark, picking through a looted market stall, is a lone Frank. Yusuf could not say quite what about him is recognizable. He is tall and broad-shouldered, but not particularly distinguishable from any other invader. He had taken his helmet off at some point, and the hood of his cowl is pushed back, his brown hair hanging in a lank curtain around his face. His sword, held pointed at the ground as if he’s almost forgotten he is holding it, is dark with blood.

Yusuf is not sure how he knows, but he is absolutely, unshakably certain that this man is—for a wild instant he thinks of him as _his Frank._ But no, that’s not what he means. This is the Frank who killed him, up on the wall. He is sure of it.

He thinks he recognizes the insignia on the man’s tabard as the symbol of Genoa. That rat bastard _would_ be from Genoa, wouldn’t he?

Yusuf has learned a lot in the hours since the wall, including how to move swiftly and silently through the streets of al-Quds. The Frank doesn’t notice him as he approaches.

He gets almost within striking distance before the man senses something and whirls around. In the split second when they are face to face, he could swear the man recognizes him too.

“You deserve this,” he hisses at the man, even though he is certain this uncultured infidel does not understand Arabic.

He jams his dagger up under the hinge of the man’s jaw, the way he has done over and over today. He watches the man’s eyes go wide, hears his wet gasp, watches the thick curtain of blood that follows his blade out of the wound.

It’s only after the man drops to his knees and gasps out his last breath on the stone floor of the market that Yusuf realizes he never even raised a hand to defend himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com)


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